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Weekly Flint Water Report: April 30-May 6

by LatashaBuckingh Posted on May 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is this week’s Flint water report. As usual, I’ve eliminated outlier readings above 2,000 parts per billion, since there are very few of them and they can affect the averages in misleading ways. During the week, DEQ took 397 samples. The average for the past week was 10.91.

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Weekly Flint Water Report: April 30-May 6

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BinC Watch: Donald Trump Has Now Changed His Mind on the Minimum Wage Three Times In Three Days

by GeoffreLDVQ Posted on May 11, 2016

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Does Donald Trump think we should raise the federal minimum wage? Let’s roll the tape:

November 10, 2015: NO!

CAVUTO: So do not raise the minimum wage? TRUMP: I would not do it.

May 8, 2016: YES!

I think people have to get more….Sure it’s a change. I’m allowed to change.

May 8, 2016: NO!

I don’t know how people make it on $7.25 an hour….I think people should get more….But I would say let the states decide.

May 11, 2016: YES!

Goofy Elizabeth Warren lied when she says I want to abolish the Federal Minimum Wage. See media—asking for increase!

So what does Trump really think about the minimum wage? There’s no telling. Maybe he really has changed his mind over and over. Maybe he didn’t realize there were separate state and federal minimum wages until someone clued him in on May 8. But his tweet today sure makes it clear that he wants an increase in the federal minimum wage. He even capitalized it to make sure we got the point. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait before he claims he never said this and he really wants the states to decide after all?

It’s easy to write this off to Trump’s general buffoonery, and that would be fair. What gets me is that his fans continue to believe everything he says even though he does stuff like this all the time. Do they really believe he’s going to build a wall? Why? I don’t think it would take him more than a few days in office to change his mind and insist that he had said all along that everything was up for negotiation.

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BinC Watch: Donald Trump Has Now Changed His Mind on the Minimum Wage Three Times In Three Days

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Donald Trump’s Negatives Could Go Up…Or Down

by weddinglady9046 Posted on May 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent channels the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton’s negatives are old and baked into the cake, while Donald Trump’s could get even worse than they are now:

Hillary Clinton has been subjected to intense scrutiny for over two decades. Note that Trump’s attacks on her are largely rehashes: He’s going after Bill Clinton’s affairs and Hillary Clinton’s alleged role in “enabling” them….While it’s possible that a renewed focus on all these things could damage Clinton further, it’s more likely that they will accomplish little, because they don’t represent new information.

By contrast, we simply don’t know yet what is out there in the record on Trump….One Dem opposition researcher has estimated that approximately 80 percent of negative stuff out there on Trump has yet to surface publicly — and they continue to do so. Which means it’s possible that Trump’s negatives have more room to grow (as preposterous as that might seem) than Clinton’s do.

This seems like the right way to bet, but I’m a little less sure. On the Hillary side, negatives that are widely accepted can actually be easier to confirm than new ones. If Trump keeps banging away on “Corrupt Hillary,” a lot of people might start remembering all that old stuff that they’d forgotten about during the past decade. And this could be easier than we think, since there are also a substantial group of Bernie supporters these days who are doing everything they can to help this narrative along.

On the Trump side, yes, his negatives have room to grow. But the opposite is true too. If a lot of people haven’t really been paying attention to the campaign yet, it’s quite possible that they might decide the guy isn’t really as bad as rumors have it. Sure, he’s not entirely PC, but he speaks his mind! He’s going to bring back jobs from China! He’s a man of the people!

Then again, maybe they’ll eventually figure out that he’s just another plutocrat Republican who plans to cut the hell out of tax rates for the rich, something a lot of people apparently don’t believe yet. But that’s not a certainty. For some reason, voters and pundits alike seem to give Republicans a pass on their tax plans, shrugging them off more as totems than as actual intentions.

In other words: I don’t know. This is not a normal year and Trump is not a normal candidate. But there’s one more thing to point out: if Pollster’s algorithms are to be believed, Trump’s negatives are actually about the same as Hillary’s and they’re both trending upward at about the same slow but steady rate. The only real difference is that Trump’s ratings are more variable than Hillary’s. This isn’t necessarily good news for Democrats.

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Donald Trump’s Negatives Could Go Up…Or Down

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Pro-Business Reforms Have Very Little Effect on Economic Growth

by EbonyBirdsong1 Posted on May 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Are pro-business reforms good for economic growth? You’d think so, but the evidence is actually unclear. So Evan Soltas tried a different approach to the question: taking a look at countries that had big, sustained jumps in the World Bank’s Doing Business Index:

This is, I think, a reasonable way of doing things: Even if you are distrustful of the index, as am I, if the World Bank says that your country is in the top 5 percent of reformers in some year, there’s probably something to that. In my sample, it took at least a 10-point increase in the ease of starting a business to qualify as a “reform” year. That is like going from India to China.

A bit of Greek-letter math later, he has an equation that links per-capita GDP growth with the World Bank index:

What I find is that neither term has a significant coefficient. In fact, I can bound the effect of pro-business reforms quite precisely around zero, with a 95-percent confidence interval for the effect of a 10-point reform on the level of per-capita output of -1.4 percent to 3.5 percent. That is far away from the claim that such a reform could double per-capita output.

Now, this isn’t nothing. The reforms led to an increase in economic growth of about 1 percent. And especially in poor countries, there may be other compelling reasons to adopt pro-business reforms. But if Soltas is right, the economic benefits are modest.

Sadly, Soltas did not put this in colorful chart format, which he needs to do if he expects to meet the expectations of his fans. But the bottom line is simple: the United States is already one of top performers in business friendliness. Incremental improvements are all that’s left to us, and the impact of improvements plateau at high levels anyway. More than likely, pro-business reforms in the US would have little to no effect on economic growth. Here’s Soltas:

Maybe the lesson here is to beware the TED-talk version of development economics. Shortening the time it takes to incorporate a small business is not a substitute for deeper institutional reforms, such as those that support investment in human and physical capital, remove economic barriers that hold back women and ethnic or religious minorities, or improve transportation, power, and sanitation infrastructure. Easy pro-business reforms should not distract countries from pursuing changes that, while harder to make, we know to be richly rewarding in the long run.

Roger that.

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Pro-Business Reforms Have Very Little Effect on Economic Growth

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BinC Watch: It’s Sunday Morning, So Today It’s "Meet the Press"

by MackBlank40688 Posted on May 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, is upset with the way the press treats Donald Trump:

Most politicians will drop a talking point if it gets labeled with Four Pinocchios by The Fact Checker or “Pants on Fire” by PolitiFact….But the news media now faces the challenge of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Trump makes Four-Pinocchio statements over and over again, even though fact checkers have demonstrated them to be false. He appears to care little about the facts; his staff does not even bother to respond to fact-checking inquiries.

But, astonishingly, television hosts rarely challenge Trump when he makes a claim that already has been found to be false.

This has been a problem during the primaries, but I’m pretty sure it’s set to change. Now that Trump is the presumptive nominee for a major party, with a real shot at becoming president, he just can’t get away with being the bullshitter-in-chief. The press is going to treat him a lot—

Hmm? What’s that? I should check out Meet the Press this morning? Sigh. What fresh hell awaits?

Trump has been retailing this particular tidbit of bullshit for months, and it’s not just untrue, but obviously untrue. Conservatives know it perfectly well, because they’re constantly talking about the high tax rates in Sweden and Germany and France and so forth, and trying to demonstrate that these high tax rates have strangled their economies. There’s really no disagreement about this.

But there’s good news! Since Trump has said this before, I already have the relevant chart at hand. No need to waste my time looking up the numbers and tossing them into Excel. So here it is. Not only are we not the highest, we’re the third lowest among rich economies:

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BinC Watch: It’s Sunday Morning, So Today It’s "Meet the Press"

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That Profile of Ben Rhodes? You Need to Read It Very Carefully.

by IndiraLarios515 Posted on May 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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I honestly don’t care much about Ben Rhodes, but reaction to David Samuels’ profile of him is getting out of hand:

Everyone is circling the wagons around Laura Rozen, and that’s fine. She’s a very good reporter. But once again, let’s take a look at what the Times profile actually says:

The person whom Kreikemeier credits with running the digital side of the campaign was Tanya Somanader, 31, the director of digital response for the White House Office of Digital Strategy, who became known in the war room and on Twitter as @TheIranDeal. Early on, Rhodes asked her to create a rapid-response account that fact-checked everything related to the Iran deal.

….For those in need of more traditional-seeming forms of validation, handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor helped retail the administration’s narrative. “Laura Rozen was my RSS feed,” Somanader offered. “She would just find everything and retweet it.”

A few points:

This quote comes from Somanader, not Rhodes.
An RSS feed is something you read. Somanader seems to be saying only that she relied on Rozen to keep her up to speed on who was saying what in the Twitterverse.
The idea that Rozen was a “handpicked Beltway insider” comes solely from Samuels’ framing of the quote, not from what Somanader actually said.

It’s common in profiles for authors to intersperse their own impressions with actual quotes. There’s nothing wrong with that. But in this profile, Samuels goes overboard. It’s possible that every quote is well framed, but he’d have to produce far more context to demonstrate that. As it stands, he seems to be a little desperate to spin quotes to make points he wants to make.

This is why I said in my previous post that you have to read Samuels’ profile very carefully. Take a look at what people actually said vs. what Samuels says in his own voice. The quotes themselves are more anodyne than they seem.

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That Profile of Ben Rhodes? You Need to Read It Very Carefully.

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Quote of the Day: Debt? What Debt?

by RJVAshely22 Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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From Donald Trump, on his plans to run up the deficit in order to rebuild infrastructure:

I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts. I’ve done very well with debt….Now we’re in a different situation with the country, but I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal. And if the economy was good it was good, so therefore, you can’t lose.

There you have it. If Trump crashes the economy, he’ll just default on our sovereign debt. Easy peasy. Why is everyone so worried?

POSTSCRIPT: This is a pretty good example of the Trump Dilemma™. Do you ignore this kind of desperate plea for attention? Or do you write a long, earnest piece about just why it’s a very bad idea indeed? You can hardly ignore it since it’s now coming from the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. But giving it oxygen just gives Trump the free media he was angling for in the first place. In this case, I’m semi-ignoring it. Josh Marshall takes the opposite tack here. Decisions, decisions.

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Quote of the Day: Debt? What Debt?

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Chart of the Day: Americans Are Pretty Upbeat About the Job Market

by DarleneDon Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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How do Americans feel about the economy? Here is Pew Research:

Americans are now more positive about the job opportunities available to them than they have been since the economic meltdown….Today’s more upbeat views rank among some of the best assessments of the job market in Pew Research Center surveys dating back 15 years.

There’s no significant partisan difference in views of the job market. However, older, poorer, and less-educated folks all report less optimism about employment than younger, richer, and better-educated respondents.

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Chart of the Day: Americans Are Pretty Upbeat About the Job Market

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Republicans Have a Tough Six Months Ahead of Them

by HarlanBaltzell4 Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Every living Republican president has decided not to endorse Donald Trump:

Bush 41, who enthusiastically endorsed every Republican nominee for the last five election cycles, will stay out of the campaign process this time. He does not have plans to endorse presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, spokesman Jim McGrath told The Texas Tribune.

….Bush 43, meanwhile, “does not plan to participate in or comment on the presidential campaign,” according to his personal aide, Freddy Ford.

I agree that Republicans partly brought Trump on themselves. But only partly. They were hoping for an ideological extremist, and before this year it wasn’t obvious either to them or to liberal critics that they might instead get a demagogic populist extremist. All of us assumed that eventually Republicans would nominate a hardcore conservative, and we were all taken by surprise when Trump stepped in instead.

So the truth is that I feel sorry for them. A lot of conservatives have an agonizing choice to make now: either support Trump or, effectively, support Hillary Clinton, a candidate they loathe. If I had a similar choice—say, between supporting a liberal Trump or supporting Ted Cruz—what would I do? I’d like to think I’d bite the bullet and support Cruz. But honestly? I don’t know. Serious Republicans have a helluva rough six months ahead of them.

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Republicans Have a Tough Six Months Ahead of Them

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Here’s How Flint’s Lead Disaster Is Likely to Affect Its Children

by AkilahGregson Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve been saying for a while that (a) the elevated lead levels in Flint were fairly moderate and probably didn’t cause a huge amount of damage, and (b) the water is now safe to drink. A reader wants me to put my money where my mouth is:

OK. The exact data I’d like to have doesn’t seem to be available, but I can provide a rough sense of the landscape. Between 2013 and 2015, the number of children in Flint with elevated blood lead levels (above 5 m/d) rose from 2.4 percent to 4.9 percent. If you plot this out, it suggests that the average increase in BLL was somewhere between 0.2 m/d and 1 m/d. Increases in BLL are approximately associated with a loss of one IQ point per m/d, so this corresponds to an average loss of perhaps half an IQ point. However, most studies are based on children with elevated BLLs throughout their childhood. The elevated blood levels in Flint only lasted for about 18 months, which suggests that even half an IQ point is probably high. It’s more like a quarter or a third of an IQ point. That’s not even measurable.

Now, this is cocktail-napkin stuff, and I’m not an expert. All I’m trying to do is give you a rough idea of the magnitude of the problem. Anyone who has better data and knows how to analyze it more rigorously is welcome to set me straight if I’ve made a mistake.

That said, it’s unlikely that I’m off by a lot. What happened in Flint was a horrible tragedy, but it’s unlikely to have a major cognitive impact on the city’s children. However, this is on average. It could have a major impact on individual children, and this is why parents should have their kids tested for lead exposure. This is doubly true in areas of Flint that are known to have had especially high water lead levels.

As for the question about drinking the water today, that’s easier to answer: thousands of residential tests confirm that lead levels in Flint’s water are below the EPA’s action level of 15 parts per billion. What’s more, blood testing confirms that elevated BLLs have returned to their 2013 levels. All of this is strong evidence that Flint water is now safe to use.

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Here’s How Flint’s Lead Disaster Is Likely to Affect Its Children

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